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The Bard of Banefort

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Everything posted by The Bard of Banefort

  1. I think HOTD is trying to set up Rhaenyra’s downfall as her being destroyed by the patriarchy, rather than having her actually be cruel or incompetent. Same with Alicent.
  2. Aegon’s Conquest is good for the lore, but it’s a pretty boring story on its own, with the Targs just steam-rolling over everyone. I’m also not sure how you could portray them as the heroes here in this day and age.
  3. Looking back at the Tamzin Merchant recasting mystery, I would guess that the most likely reason she was replaced was probably just that she wanted more money. It would explain why everyone was so cagey about the recasting (salaries aren’t something that’s really discussed publicly), and why the other “established actresses” who were offered the role before Emilia turned it down. Pretty much all of the young cast in season one were unknowns who likely weren’t getting paid much by Hollywood standards. (And just speaking from my own experience in the job market, I have definitely noticed that the lower I put my “desired salary” on a job application, the more likely I am to get an interview. I’ve heard similar things from other people.)
  4. He said last year was a bad one for him professionally, too. Obviously the writing isn’t going well, but I think he was probably alluding more to the TV projects, since that’s what seems to give him the most joy at this point in his career. Maybe these spin-off shows are just getting too expensive. His latest blog post was also a reminder for me that as old as I may feel at times, I still have a long way to go. There are a lot of think pieces going around these days asking “why don’t young people care about x, y, z?” But that’s just part of getting on in life. You can’t exist in a permanent state of hysteria, especially when so much of what’s going on in the world is beyond your control.
  5. Judging by his latest blog post, I wouldn’t expect a new book anytime soon. He’s clearly not in a good headspace. The most we can do is pray for another Miracle Mets season, because I think that’s the only thing that would be able to considerably lift his spirits at this point.
  6. I was reading some excerpts from a recent interview Sophie Turner did, and it’s interesting how she seems to have some regrets about being a child star. I wonder if other former child actors feel the same way? https://x.com/badpost_sophiet/status/1749003971237216664?s=46
  7. I think we’d all be a lot more excited if some new written material came out. Winds, Dunk & Egg, Fire & Blood—I’ll take anything at this point.
  8. What I meant is that it’s spreading and becoming less niche.
  9. BES is a really easy show to re-watch, too, since it’s so short. This might interest some of you. I have a relative who is an elementary school teacher, and he was telling me that many of his students are into anime/manga, particularly the girls. Anime was very much present when I was a kid* but it was still kind of a niche thing, and it mostly appealed to boys. It’s pretty neat to see how the cultural exchange continues to grow. * I did miss out on K-Pop though
  10. Update: Just re-read your comment and realized that I misunderstood what you were saying. You were able to watch BES with the Japanese dubbing?
  11. Just finished Blue Eye Samurai and I really enjoyed it. There were some plot threads that didn’t sit quite so well with me, but I think that they may make more sense once the story is told in full. The funny thing is, I don’t particularly like violence, so I ended up just tuning it out/looking away during the gorier scenes and focusing on the story. I have so many thoughts!
  12. Is there a thread for Blue Eye Samurai? I really enjoyed it, but at the same time, I’m thinking it may have been better if I had waited until the show was over and binge-watched it. It left me wanting more, but there were some characters who fell flat for me and I think I may have felt differently if I watched the characters’ arcs from beginning to end.
  13. They put out the casting call in October (you made a video about it). The strike didn’t end until November.
  14. The irony is that after the initial wave of critical reviews, it’s all but guaranteed that fans will come to love TWOW no matter what their first impression is. Because let’s be honest: we’re basically a cult at this point. Twelve years later and we’re still hanging around here everyday, hunting for breadcrumbs. So George really has nothing to worry about.
  15. I suppose that could be true, but I think the fact that the casting call is still open is a big indication that they aren’t close to cinching the role(s) yet, especially since they started during the SAG strike (which is a bit sleazy since HBO is an American company, but alas). I’m no actor, but in pretty much every other field, employers close off applications once they’ve narrowed the field down to a few prime candidates. That said, I agree that there are probably other shows they want to get out of the gate first, namely Euphoria and The White Lotus (also The Gilded Age, which appears to be the big new 65+ show haha).
  16. It’s a strange paradox, because many of us (including myself) wouldn’t have found ASOIAF without GOT, and the timing lined up perfectly for the show’s success. I don’t think GOT would be as successful as it was if it came out today. But the show starting before the series was complete was disastrous for the books. The publishing house lost any leverage they had in pressuring GRRM to finish the next book, and all the fame and adulation made him too insecure to finish the story.
  17. The casting call from October is still the pinned tweet on Lucy Bevan Casting’s page, so I’m guessing that they’re still struggling to find the right actor for Dunk. It’s a tough role to cast—you need someone talented enough to carry the show who also meets very specific physical requirements. At worst, they can find someone tall-ish and use some CGI magic to make him appear taller, ala Ian McKellan in LOTR.
  18. I’m partial to “the half-moon queen.” It sounds very GRRM. I also think that the Sand Snakes will cause Myrcella’s death, and Arianne will develop some Lady Macbeth-style guilt after becoming Aegon’s queen.
  19. Sam Tarly. He managed to get his preferred candidate elected Lord Commander in less than a week, and all while he was still a teenager.
  20. He’s spent so long writing and rewriting Winds now that he’ll never be satisfied with it. This is one of the problems that crops up when authors reach a level of success where they no longer have to listen to their editors. Charles Dickens wrote most of his books in installments and therefore could only ponder over each successive part for a limited amount of time, and usually his stories benefitted from it. Now, I’m not saying that any modern author should write under the constraints that Dickens did, particularly for a series as unwieldy as ASOIAF, but I think GRRM would have benefitted from having a stricter deadline or more resolute editor. It would have forced him to keep the ball rolling.
  21. I feel like HOTD is both better and worse than GOT in its portrayal of women. On the pro side, they’ve cut back on the sexual assault scenes. Some of the sex scenes actually feel sensual (for a show that was so big on sex, GOT was remarkably unsexy in how its characters interacted. It was more like a Playboy photo shoot, where all the sex appeal was just attractive people standing around without any clothes on). It doesn’t have the same exploitative feeling to it, which made even Arya and Gendry’s love scene in S8 feel cringe-inducing. Women actually speak directly to each other (when I went back and watched the trailers for GOT, I believe there was only one instance of a woman talking to another, unlike the HOTD trailer, which put a huge emphasis on the dynamic between Rhaenyra, Alicent, and Rhaenys). They’re even occasionally friendly to one another (I remember there being commentary about how the scene where Gilly meets Sam’s family was one of the only times women on GOT were nice to each other). As someone who found most of GOT’s costumes hideous, this is also an area where HOTD greatly outperformed its predecessor. At the same time, the female characters of HOTD are very. . . flat. They have no desires or ambitions. None of them want power, but instead have it forced upon them by circumstance. Rulership is a burden they resent. Motherhood brings them no joy (even Rhaenyra, who bonds with her sons, spends more than half the season haunted by the prospect of childbirth, which is presented as worse than death itself). Whereas GOT focused on women overcoming the obstacles of a patriarchal world and thriving despite the barriers it imposed on them, the three main female characters of HOTD all resign themselves to being passive housewives. Alicent never manages to stand up to Viserys, Rhaenyra turns a blind eye to all of Daemon’s flaws, even when this includes physical violence against her, and Rhaenys FFS won’t even champion her own granddaughter’s inheritance when someone with a weaker claim to Driftmark tries to take it from her. Every relationship between them and a male contemporary is depicted as predatory. The women aren’t allowed to be bad or even morally ambiguous. Everyone talks about how Rhaenys bursting through the Dragonpit was the worst part of HOTD, but I find Alicent launching a coup because she genuinely misunderstood her husband’s last words (who she knew was hopped up on drugs) far dumber and more indicative of HOTD’s biggest flaws. Alicent has every reason in the world to champion her son’s claim over Rhaenyra’s, but in the writers’ minds, her not supporting a fellow girlboss is a far greater sin than putting her sons at Team Blacks’ mercy. It reminds me of the new wave of Anne Boleyn stans who are convinced that she was an innocent bystander who was carried along entirely by wicked men. Was Anne the conniving slattern that she’s traditionally remembered as? Probably not. But no one who’s part of a decade-long plot to topple both a reigning monarch and the state religion is totally innocent and powerless, just like how no one who launches a civil war does it by accident. Watching Olivia Cooke try to explain Alicent’s character arc in interviews is an exercise in cognitive dissonance; we’re back to the good old days of GOT actors trying to rationalize why their characters behave in such bizarre ways. And look, I realize that GOT left HOTD in a really tough spot. The misogyny on GOT was so blatant that it permanently tarred the franchise. Showrunners are people too, and it’s clear that all of them are in fear of backlash in the age of social media (James Hibberd, while technically discussing FCKAD and not HOTD, basically said as much in his Reddit AMA). Because of how poorly Daenerys’ ending was received, Rhaenyra’s ending is all but doomed to the same fate, which is why they’re trying to write it as intentional social commentary—the weight of the patriarchy destroyed Rhaenyra and without it she would have triumphed. But in doing so, they sacrificed a lot of what makes these characters human and, frankly, compelling.
  22. Spoiler alert: that’ll be next year’s New Year’s update too.
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